Alpha Anywhere contains powerful integration with PhoneGap Build for developing and deploying hybrid applications. With Alpha Anywhere, you can create mobile apps with responsive design that can be deployed to a variety of platforms. The client-side data cache is a new feature available in Alpha Anywhere for storing offline data. This post is a technical deep dive for Alpha Anywhere developers who build or are interested in building hybrid applications using PhoneGap build.

In a PhoneGap hybrid application, if your UX contains Dropdownbox controls, the choices shown in the Dropdownbox controls will be defined at design time (when the PhoneGap application is built).

However, in your application you might want the choices in the Dropdownbox controls to be defined at run-time. Your app should make a callback to the server to get current data for the Dropdownbox controls and then persist that data locally so that the next time the app is loaded it already has the data for the Dropdownbox controls. The client-side data cache is ideal for this scenario.

In this video we show how you can define client-side data cache items for the data to populate Dropdownbox controls.